How to see New York without looking

Raymond Depardon's images of 1970s NYC were captured so discreetly he didn't lift his camera

From Raymond Depardon's Manhattan Out, published by SteidlPhoto: STEIDL

by Lucy Davies

12:59PM GMT 01 Jan 2009

"My stay at the madhouse off the Venetian coast lasted a little too long," recalls Raymond Depardon of his sojourn in an Italian psychiatric clinic in 1976. "I felt at home."

The French photographer had checked himself in to the clinic after a harrowing two-year assignment in Chad, the troubled republic known as the Dead Heart of Africa. The images of conflict he took there had earned him a Pulitzer Prize, but they came at no small cost to his mental health.

Suffering what he describes as "some personal confinement issues", Depardon was encouraged by the doctors to photograph his fellow patients as a means of treatment. "I was learning how to move before such pain," he says, "and muster the courage to document their suffering." Wandering those institutional corridors, camera in hand, he perfected his ability to take revealing photographs of others without them even registering his presence.

A new book of his work shows what an asset this skill was to prove. Manhattan Out contains more than 100 pictures of New York City, taken by Depardon as part of his first project following his Italian convalescence.

It was a winter, and New York was at its inhospitable worst; the seedy urban jungle depicted in such films as Taxi Driver and Serpico. A stranger to the city, Depardon killed time strolling the streets with his Leica slung around his neck, the camera becoming his "alibi against that feeling of guilt born from having nothing else to do".

Lightweight, virtually silent, unobtrusive, the Leica was perfect for quick-fire photography. Depardon took things a step further by taking pictures without even lifting the viewfinder to his eye. "My body would perform the tracking shots, like a filmmaker," he says. He worked incognito, enveloped in a huge parka wtih a woolly hood. "I was terrified of Americans; I did not speak their language," he says. "I was in the most tolerant city in the world, and still I was afraid of taking that next photo."

He filled two or three rolls of film a day but at the time was thoroughly disappointed with the negatives that resulted. "I hated them. The composition was wrong. So was this. So was that." He never mentioned the work again and only recently decided to print the images, nearly 30 years after they were taken.

It is hard to understand his displeasure with these exceptionally compelling snapshots. Perhaps they were, for him, a painful reminder of his introverted state of mind – their unknown subjects loom threateningly close to the lens. In shades of grey they record what Depardon calls "petits accidents de la vie". If you look at several of them one after the other, they appear to mirror the elastic, casual way we habitually look at the world around us. More than that, they seem to prove, as Goethe once wrote, that "It is good to think, better to look and think, best to look without thinking".

D 'Manhattan Out' by Raymond Depardon is published by Steidl, priced at £25, and is available now.